The horrendous murders in Paris appear to have ignited a firestorm of defenders of free speech urging us to “print the cartoons”, an understandable, and likely to be unheeded plea, at least by the West’s major newspapers. That is all for the good, for contrary to claims that not re-printing cartoons inflammatory to many Muslims amounts to cowardice, (a claim I do not understand given how many journalists at these institutions have risked or lost their lives covering conflicts) printing them in seeming defiant defense of free speech is exactly what the terrorists wish we would do.

Islamists need for there to be a violent confrontation between their version of the world and the one born in the West, they need for Muslim minorities in Western countries to feel besieged, their religion disparaged, their value as human beings reduced to that of a threatening other.

France’s population of 5 million Muslims is perhaps the most secular group of Muslims in the world.  The overwhelming majority aren’t looking for a Caliphate they’re just looking for a job. They are not, as a best selling recent work of French speculative fiction, Soumission (Submission) depicts, likely to create a future Islamized France.

Rather, a handful of crazies might have managed to make a European nightmare of 21st century Ottomans at the gates of Vienna seem real, but only if Europeans let it.

It’s a nightmare that won’t benefit the Islamists much, but could greatly benefit the European right which had already identified Europe’s Muslim minority as the scapegoat for the continent’s decline. Neo-fascist parties such as Marie Le Pen’s National Front in France itself, or Nigel Farage’s UKIP in the UK. Europe is going through a very troubling identity crisis where even countries that should surely know better, namely Germany, have seen the rise of things like “Pegida” — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West- which bring thousands to the streets in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim marches. Islamists and the right need each other like the communists and Nazis in order to make fanatics out of the rest of us. I sincerely hope that neither the Muslims nor the non- Muslims of Europe will let them do it.